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Friday Funk #14 – ‘I Got The Feelin’’ by James Brown
Friday Funk #14 – ‘I Got The Feelin’’ by James Brown
Friday Funk #14 – ‘I Got The Feelin’’ by James Brown
This Friday Funk is in celebration of Jimmy Nolen and Clyde Stubblefield, two principal players in the birth and development of funk with James Brown. Nolen would have turned 90 years old on 3 April, and Stubblefield 81 years old on 18 April.
By 1968, James Brown’s revolutionary funk era was well underway. ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ and ‘Cold Sweat’ had arrived in ’65 and ’67. After initially thinking of his new sound as simply “where my music was going”, he had begun using the term ‘funk.’ I Got The Feelin’ included ‘Just Plain Funk - Instrumental’, and earlier in the year ‘Funky Soul #1’ appeared on I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me, which was released just a month before Feelin’.
Brown’s horn section, which for this tune comprised Pee Wee Ellis, Waymon Reed, Joe Dupars, Levi Rasbury, and Al Clark, plays in a brilliantly percussive style typical of Brown’s early funk. They emphasise rhythm over melody until the brief sax solo on the fadeout. In certain bars they just play a single note in answer to the guitar, as from 00:30, 1:22, and 1:52.
Those stabs of horns and Stubblefield’s kick drum display the power of the One. But the song is arguably more of an example of the other qualities of funk that make you want to move: polyrhythms and syncopation.
The two guitars, mixed to sound almost like a single guitar, play contrasting rhythms. Generally every other bar, one guitar lets a deepish note ring out. The other guitar part is a classic example of Jimmy Nolen’s “scratch” style, where he quickly fretted strings to play snatches of chords usually only heard for a fraction of a second. In between chords, Nolen plays muted strings – no chords, no melody, just rhythm.
Like the horns, Nolen’s guitar resembles drums. As Brown wrote of his new sound, “I was hearing everything, even the guitar, like they were drums.” He wrote of Nolen’s playing, “He was what we called a chanker; instead of playing the whole chord and using all the strings, he hit his chords on just three strings.” Nolen playing on the higher-pitched strings, as well as his trebley guitar sound helped his parts cut through the drums and bass.
Nolen was edging the guitar closer towards a percussion instrument, with just enough harmony so that the music wasn’t solely percussive. Listen to the most melodic part of Brown’s vocal: “Sometimes I’m up / Sometimes I’m down” from 1:00. That melody really stands out as Brown’s band is so focused on rhythm.
Stubblefield’s restless groove is full of syncopation. Asides from the emphasis on the One, Stubblefield dances away from the pulse through pretty much the entire song. Tap your foot to the song and you’ll find how few of Stubblefield’s hits arrive on the meter. The only time he plays straight for any length of time is when he joins the horn section for three beats in unison just before the bridge, as at 00:43.
That bridge is one of the most striking aspects of ‘Feelin’’. As discussed in Further Explorations of Funk, part 2, Brown used bridges as a variation on the main groove. We get 45 seconds of the main groove before a wild, discordant blast of horns pierces the speakers.
Fred Wesley, who joined Brown’s band later the same year, has said of the bridge: “it goes [sings high note]. That note was nowhere. It wasn’t in time, it wasn’t in place, it wasn’t a chord anywhere. And then James goes, “Baby, baby, baby,” and it comes back to the first vamp. That’s kind of an example of a song that was wrong but it came out right. The chord that was just in the middle of song, he made it come out right. And you know what, when we try to do that tune again we cannot do it. We cannot do it [the same way].”
In Wesley’s words, Brown “was a crazy innovator. He was creatively crazy. Because the things he came up with actually you cannot do in music – because it just was musically wrong. But he made it right. He twisted it around until it came out right.”
While Brown’s repetitions of “Baby” arrive in a predictable rhythm, elsewhere in the song he barely sings two successive words on a straight beat. Even when the lines “Sometimes I’m up / Sometimes I’m down” share a melody and words, they’re delivered offbeat, Brown finding pockets of space no other part of the band is occupying.
Along with the catchy “Baby, baby, baby” melody, Brown’s touches of syncopation become hooks in themselves: not quite in the same way that a Beach Boys melody might get stuck in your head, but they’ll make you want to revisit a track to hear – and feel – something again.
Some of Brown’s lyrics seem almost incidental. He sings (possibly), “My heart, I’m around the town / I’m level with the ground, baby / I said level with the ground.”
As discussed in part 5 of our funky explorations, Stubblefield pointed to the song as an example of Brown’s impromptu writing and recording. “A song like ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ (...) ‘I Got The Feelin’’, all that – it was right there out of his mind. He was good at that, and that’s why today you don’t understand a lot of the words he’s saying on the record, ’cause he’s making up stuff.”
This Friday Funk is in celebration of Jimmy Nolen and Clyde Stubblefield, two principal players in the birth and development of funk with James Brown. Nolen would have turned 90 years old on 3 April, and Stubblefield 81 years old on 18 April.
By 1968, James Brown’s revolutionary funk era was well underway. ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ and ‘Cold Sweat’ had arrived in ’65 and ’67. After initially thinking of his new sound as simply “where my music was going”, he had begun using the term ‘funk.’ I Got The Feelin’ included ‘Just Plain Funk - Instrumental’, and earlier in the year ‘Funky Soul #1’ appeared on I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me, which was released just a month before Feelin’.
Brown’s horn section, which for this tune comprised Pee Wee Ellis, Waymon Reed, Joe Dupars, Levi Rasbury, and Al Clark, plays in a brilliantly percussive style typical of Brown’s early funk. They emphasise rhythm over melody until the brief sax solo on the fadeout. In certain bars they just play a single note in answer to the guitar, as from 00:30, 1:22, and 1:52.
Those stabs of horns and Stubblefield’s kick drum display the power of the One. But the song is arguably more of an example of the other qualities of funk that make you want to move: polyrhythms and syncopation.
The two guitars, mixed to sound almost like a single guitar, play contrasting rhythms. Generally every other bar, one guitar lets a deepish note ring out. The other guitar part is a classic example of Jimmy Nolen’s “scratch” style, where he quickly fretted strings to play snatches of chords usually only heard for a fraction of a second. In between chords, Nolen plays muted strings – no chords, no melody, just rhythm.
Like the horns, Nolen’s guitar resembles drums. As Brown wrote of his new sound, “I was hearing everything, even the guitar, like they were drums.” He wrote of Nolen’s playing, “He was what we called a chanker; instead of playing the whole chord and using all the strings, he hit his chords on just three strings.” Nolen playing on the higher-pitched strings, as well as his trebley guitar sound helped his parts cut through the drums and bass.
Nolen was edging the guitar closer towards a percussion instrument, with just enough harmony so that the music wasn’t solely percussive. Listen to the most melodic part of Brown’s vocal: “Sometimes I’m up / Sometimes I’m down” from 1:00. That melody really stands out as Brown’s band is so focused on rhythm.
Stubblefield’s restless groove is full of syncopation. Asides from the emphasis on the One, Stubblefield dances away from the pulse through pretty much the entire song. Tap your foot to the song and you’ll find how few of Stubblefield’s hits arrive on the meter. The only time he plays straight for any length of time is when he joins the horn section for three beats in unison just before the bridge, as at 00:43.
That bridge is one of the most striking aspects of ‘Feelin’’. As discussed in Further Explorations of Funk, part 2, Brown used bridges as a variation on the main groove. We get 45 seconds of the main groove before a wild, discordant blast of horns pierces the speakers.
Fred Wesley, who joined Brown’s band later the same year, has said of the bridge: “it goes [sings high note]. That note was nowhere. It wasn’t in time, it wasn’t in place, it wasn’t a chord anywhere. And then James goes, “Baby, baby, baby,” and it comes back to the first vamp. That’s kind of an example of a song that was wrong but it came out right. The chord that was just in the middle of song, he made it come out right. And you know what, when we try to do that tune again we cannot do it. We cannot do it [the same way].”
In Wesley’s words, Brown “was a crazy innovator. He was creatively crazy. Because the things he came up with actually you cannot do in music – because it just was musically wrong. But he made it right. He twisted it around until it came out right.”
While Brown’s repetitions of “Baby” arrive in a predictable rhythm, elsewhere in the song he barely sings two successive words on a straight beat. Even when the lines “Sometimes I’m up / Sometimes I’m down” share a melody and words, they’re delivered offbeat, Brown finding pockets of space no other part of the band is occupying.
Along with the catchy “Baby, baby, baby” melody, Brown’s touches of syncopation become hooks in themselves: not quite in the same way that a Beach Boys melody might get stuck in your head, but they’ll make you want to revisit a track to hear – and feel – something again.
Some of Brown’s lyrics seem almost incidental. He sings (possibly), “My heart, I’m around the town / I’m level with the ground, baby / I said level with the ground.”
As discussed in part 5 of our funky explorations, Stubblefield pointed to the song as an example of Brown’s impromptu writing and recording. “A song like ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ (...) ‘I Got The Feelin’’, all that – it was right there out of his mind. He was good at that, and that’s why today you don’t understand a lot of the words he’s saying on the record, ’cause he’s making up stuff.”
This Friday Funk is in celebration of Jimmy Nolen and Clyde Stubblefield, two principal players in the birth and development of funk with James Brown. Nolen would have turned 90 years old on 3 April, and Stubblefield 81 years old on 18 April.
By 1968, James Brown’s revolutionary funk era was well underway. ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ and ‘Cold Sweat’ had arrived in ’65 and ’67. After initially thinking of his new sound as simply “where my music was going”, he had begun using the term ‘funk.’ I Got The Feelin’ included ‘Just Plain Funk - Instrumental’, and earlier in the year ‘Funky Soul #1’ appeared on I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me, which was released just a month before Feelin’.
Brown’s horn section, which for this tune comprised Pee Wee Ellis, Waymon Reed, Joe Dupars, Levi Rasbury, and Al Clark, plays in a brilliantly percussive style typical of Brown’s early funk. They emphasise rhythm over melody until the brief sax solo on the fadeout. In certain bars they just play a single note in answer to the guitar, as from 00:30, 1:22, and 1:52.
Those stabs of horns and Stubblefield’s kick drum display the power of the One. But the song is arguably more of an example of the other qualities of funk that make you want to move: polyrhythms and syncopation.
The two guitars, mixed to sound almost like a single guitar, play contrasting rhythms. Generally every other bar, one guitar lets a deepish note ring out. The other guitar part is a classic example of Jimmy Nolen’s “scratch” style, where he quickly fretted strings to play snatches of chords usually only heard for a fraction of a second. In between chords, Nolen plays muted strings – no chords, no melody, just rhythm.
Like the horns, Nolen’s guitar resembles drums. As Brown wrote of his new sound, “I was hearing everything, even the guitar, like they were drums.” He wrote of Nolen’s playing, “He was what we called a chanker; instead of playing the whole chord and using all the strings, he hit his chords on just three strings.” Nolen playing on the higher-pitched strings, as well as his trebley guitar sound helped his parts cut through the drums and bass.
Nolen was edging the guitar closer towards a percussion instrument, with just enough harmony so that the music wasn’t solely percussive. Listen to the most melodic part of Brown’s vocal: “Sometimes I’m up / Sometimes I’m down” from 1:00. That melody really stands out as Brown’s band is so focused on rhythm.
Stubblefield’s restless groove is full of syncopation. Asides from the emphasis on the One, Stubblefield dances away from the pulse through pretty much the entire song. Tap your foot to the song and you’ll find how few of Stubblefield’s hits arrive on the meter. The only time he plays straight for any length of time is when he joins the horn section for three beats in unison just before the bridge, as at 00:43.
That bridge is one of the most striking aspects of ‘Feelin’’. As discussed in Further Explorations of Funk, part 2, Brown used bridges as a variation on the main groove. We get 45 seconds of the main groove before a wild, discordant blast of horns pierces the speakers.
Fred Wesley, who joined Brown’s band later the same year, has said of the bridge: “it goes [sings high note]. That note was nowhere. It wasn’t in time, it wasn’t in place, it wasn’t a chord anywhere. And then James goes, “Baby, baby, baby,” and it comes back to the first vamp. That’s kind of an example of a song that was wrong but it came out right. The chord that was just in the middle of song, he made it come out right. And you know what, when we try to do that tune again we cannot do it. We cannot do it [the same way].”
In Wesley’s words, Brown “was a crazy innovator. He was creatively crazy. Because the things he came up with actually you cannot do in music – because it just was musically wrong. But he made it right. He twisted it around until it came out right.”
While Brown’s repetitions of “Baby” arrive in a predictable rhythm, elsewhere in the song he barely sings two successive words on a straight beat. Even when the lines “Sometimes I’m up / Sometimes I’m down” share a melody and words, they’re delivered offbeat, Brown finding pockets of space no other part of the band is occupying.
Along with the catchy “Baby, baby, baby” melody, Brown’s touches of syncopation become hooks in themselves: not quite in the same way that a Beach Boys melody might get stuck in your head, but they’ll make you want to revisit a track to hear – and feel – something again.
Some of Brown’s lyrics seem almost incidental. He sings (possibly), “My heart, I’m around the town / I’m level with the ground, baby / I said level with the ground.”
As discussed in part 5 of our funky explorations, Stubblefield pointed to the song as an example of Brown’s impromptu writing and recording. “A song like ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ (...) ‘I Got The Feelin’’, all that – it was right there out of his mind. He was good at that, and that’s why today you don’t understand a lot of the words he’s saying on the record, ’cause he’s making up stuff.”